58. Wishful Thinking

My phone rings and when I answer there is silence on the other end but it doesn’t matter because I know it’s her (caller ID). And I know her well enough to wait.

And the pregnant pause gives birth.

She tells me she’s read my latest writing and she goes on and on about what she’s found tucked between the lines. Her insight, as always, amazes me. She finds layers and textures within the text that I didn’t intend but her reasoning is sound and the examples she sites are efficient in the way that only the truth can be.

But she doesn’t stop there. She goes on to tie her findings to myself and though I’ve operated within this skin for all my life, she seems to understand what brews beneath better than I ever did.

I fight my tears because I want to savor the moment – to draw a bowl of glass around this space and time, pinching the ends closed so it’s airtight, preserving the essence of it. But the tears come anyway because I feel I’ve been found – adrift in the populous sea, she found me.

The irony amuses me because I thought it was I who did the discovering – I thought I was the one who noticed her in the New Fiction section, lost in pages. And as I stumbled through the small talk and asked for her number, I thought I was the brave one – but it was she who took a chance and told me the truth (one digit off, she confessed to me once, that’s all it takes to turn them away).

And she doesn’t ask why because she already knows. She just smiles (over the line, through the wires, I can see her smiling) and points out a typo and a misplaced comma.